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 (120106) Before
contemplating the sublime metaphysical head trip called The
Fountain, it's best to remove your shoes and socks. Shave
your head. Assume the lotus position. Exhale slowly. Ommmm.
Now close your eyes. No, bad idea; then you wouldn't be able
to read. Just keep them open while you visualize this:
Hugh Jackman, hairy and bearded, as a conquistador fighting
an ancient Mayan priest who tells him that "death is the
road to awe." Hugh Jackman, hairy but clean-shaven,
operating on a monkey brain as a modern-day cancer
researcher. Hugh Jackman, bald, floating inside an orb with
a sentient tree as they drift through space toward a golden
nebula. He is, like you, in the lotus position.
There you have it: The Fountain, a film that defies
description, summation, expectation or any other -tion.
Exquisitely beautiful and almost unbearably sad, it is also
— no way around this — truly strange. However strange you
think it is, it's stranger. Plopping Hugh Jackman into a
giant soap bubble isn't the half of it, but it's a fine
place to meditate on the movie's oddness. The Fountain is
cinema as poetry; romance as revelation; science fiction as
prayer. It ponders death, and not as some pale Bergman chess
master, but death as a form of ecstasy.
The word from the Venice Film Festival, where The Fountain
first saw the light of day, was that the latest work from
writer-director Darren Aronofsky (Requiem for a Dream, Pi)
is a dull and pretentious slice of sci-fi silliness, at once
too cerebral and too slow-moving. Funny, a lot of folks once
said the same thing about Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space
Odyssey, and now it's routinely considered one of the two or
three greatest science fiction films ever made.
Mind you, I'm not placing The Fountain on that esteemed
level, but to dismiss this out of hand is to miss the
overriding passion that Aronofsky pours into every frame of
his wildly uneven but always watch able epic.
As a writer and director, Darren Aronofsky has never been
one to shy from either the morbid or the ecstatic, and he's
yet to make a conventional film of any kind. His most recent
feature, 2000's Requiem for a Dream, concerned four addicts
chasing different forms of bliss, while his breakout Pi
followed an obsessive math whiz on a quest to find the
216-digit name for God. In Aronofsky's movies, the path to
enlightenment — that "road to awe" — isn't lined with
wildflowers, unless they're sprouting violently from
someone's midriff.
Yes, that happens in The Fountain. A lot happens in The
Fountain, though it's barely an hour and a half long. The
monkey-brain researcher is married to a terminally ill
author (Rachel Weisz, a vision on her own), who's almost
finished with a manuscript titled, of course, The Fountain.
Her book follows Jackman's conquistador to Central America,
where he's been enjoined by Queen Isabella of Spain (Weisz
again) to find a mythical pyramid that guards the Tree of
Life — which was hidden by God after Adam and Eve were
expelled from Eden.
Meanwhile, inside the orb, bald Jackman speaks to a tree
(strokes it, loves it, eats it) while the two of them bob
through space toward a star formation that might be Xibalbá,
the Mayan underworld. Xibalbá is where the dead find new
life, we're told. And where the dying author gazes, in
rapture, from the snowy roof of her home. It's no accident
that she's named Creo, Spanish for "I believe."
Here I'm compelled to say two things. First: This is one
outlandish film, and many viewers will hate it. Hate. It.
Second: It's nevertheless a transcendent work of art, a
vision of undying love that finds hope in grief, epiphany in
death and life in the loss of Eden. Trippy visuals (inspired
by David Bowie: true fact) and an urgent score (by Clint
Mansell, with help from the Kronos Quartet) combine with a
quixotic screenplay (by Aronofsky and Ari Handel) and
Jackman's guts-bared performance to create a work both
foolish and divine.
So, in a way, the film is his version of "2001: A Space
Odyssey," and many viewers will enjoy its similarly
challenging structure and New Age razzle-dazzle, which is
nicely crystallized by some especially imaginative special
effects in the climax.
In an era in which even the so-called independent cinema
chases formulas and is ruled by a cowardly herd instinct,
you really have to admire Aronofsky's guts for making such a
risky, uncompromising, spiritual-minded film.
I, for one, was transfixed: eyes wide open, awed.
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